Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? - a leading physician for the UN is introduced by his new bride to her well to do, progressive-liberal white family. Oh, yes, he's black! (Remade as the comedy Guess Who with Ashton Kutcher.)

Poitier played mostly noble, dignified roles. A more recent film was The Simple Life of Noah Dearborn, in which he plays a man with an intense devotion to his carpentry work; who indeed built most of the buildings in his small rural town; but who becomes the target of a mean-spirited campaign to take his land away from him by having him declared mentally incompetent.

Notes

↑ In 1967 three of his movies -- To Sir, With Love, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? -- led all others at the box office. NY Times